Well I was working in on a Private Cloud Deployment where we had some temporary storage for our Hyper-V Virtual Machines and after we got the right storage ready, which was btw a Windows Server Scale-Out File Server Cluster running with Storage Spaces and DataON JBOD chassis, we had to migrate the storage of all virtual machines running on our Hyper-V hosts. Since Windows Server 2012 offers Live Storage Migration which allows us to move the Virtual Machine to a different storage location without downtime we would use that. But if you have to move around 20 virtual machines you think twice if you want to move that via the Hyper-V Manager GUI or Windows PowerShell.

Here is a pretty simple PowerShell foreach loop which moves the storage of all virtual machines running on the Hyper-V host.

Do you have what it takes to write the best script for a Nutanix environment? Find out by participating in the inaugural Total Recode challenge. This global contest gives you a platform for showcasing your best talent. May the most creative, badass coding guru win!

Want to get more familiar with the Nutanix product and test your script? Check out the Nutanix Prism APIs and our recently announced Community Edition software.

E2EVC Virtualization Conference is a non-commercial, virtualization community event. The main goal of the E2EVC is to bring the best virtualization experts together to exchange knowledge and to establish new connections. E2EVC is a weekend crammed with presentations, Master Classes and discussions delivered by both virtualization vendors product teams and independent experts. I am happy to be part of the community and listen to other industry leading experts, hopefully see you in Berlin.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) allows direct memory access over an Ethernet network. RoCE is a link layer protocol, and hence, it allows communication between any two hosts in the same Ethernet broadcast domain. RoCE delivers superior performance compared to traditional network socket implementations because of lower latency, lower CPU utilization and higher utilization of network bandwidth. Windows Server 2012 and later versions use RDMA for accelerating and improving the performance of SMB file sharing traffic and Live Migration. If you need to know more about RDMA or SMB Direct checkout my blog post: Hyper-V over SMB: SMB Direct

A couple of weeks ago I passed Microsoft Exam 70-533 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions, which is focused on implementing and designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure solutions such as Azure Websites or Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS). I think taking this exam and preparing for it was a great idea. Even if I have already done a couple of projects on Azure I still learned a lot during the preparation and you can find some of the best practices. Since Azure is a huge beast and the rapid deployment of new features, you will definitely find some new stuff you didn’t know before during the preparation for the exam. And of course taking new Microsoft Certifications early helps you to stand out in the IT Pro or Developer world. Of course passing exams alone does not make you an expert, but if you have know-how on a topic it’s is always got to have some kind of paper to prove it.

So what are the skills measured for this exam. The exam 70-533 focuses on 6 topics, Azure Websites, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Storage, Azure Active Directory and Virtual Networks. To my surprise I got a really good score on Azure Websites and of course Virtual Machines, since I used to run several of them on Azure. I also found out that Azure Active Directory is one of the parts I have to invest a little more.

Preparation

To prepare for the exam I used several different resources such as Microsoft Virtual Academy, TechNet, Channel9 and of course Microsoft Azure it self. I also found some great community blogs which have some link summaries:

Microsoft today released some dates for the upcoming free TechNet events for IT-Pros in Switzerland. The events are focused on different Microsoft Technologies such as Windows 10, Microsoft Azure, System Center, Cloud OS, Windows Server, Office and many more. Together with Philipp Witschi (itnetx) and Michael Rüefli (itnetx & Microsoft MVP) I will present about the new features in Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center vNext.

To get an overview about Windows Server & System Center vNext you can also join the following session with Markus Erlacher (itnetx), Marcel Zehner (itnetx & Microsoft MVP) and Martin Wüthrich (itnetx).

All the Windows File Server nodes on which DPM virtual hard disks reside and on which deduplication will be enabled must be running Windows Server 2012 R2 with Update Rollup November 2014.

Deduplication is enabled on the CSV of the Scale-Out File Server

It is recommended to use Storage Spaces but it is not required

Use Parity Storage Spaces with enclosure-awareness for resiliency and increased disk utilization.

Format NTFS with 64 KB allocation units and large file record segments to work better with dedup use of sparse files.

In the hardware configuration above the recommended volume size is 7.2TB volumes.

Plan and set up DPM and deduplication scheduling

Tune the File Server Cluster for DPM Storage

The combination of deduplication and DPM provides substantial space savings. This allows higher retention rates, more frequent backups, and better TCO for the DPM deployment. The guidance and recommendations in this document should provide you with the tools and knowledge to configure deduplication for DPM storage and see the benefits for yourself in your own deployment.

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About

My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.